This design for a special cabinet creates a guesthouse within a newly designed villa that was carved out of a mountain wall in the village of Vals in Switzerland.

This special villa, designed by the renowned architectural firm SeARCH in collaboration with Christian Müller architects, has only one visible element which is an elliptical patio, manifest as a circular hole in the steep mountainside.

By materializing the invisible lines that define the very conditions of this house (the contour of the mountain, and the radials of the patio) a 3-dimensional cardboard matrix is created.

The idea was inspired by the medieval painting ‘St. Jerome in his study’ by Antonella da Messina.Like this painting, the cardboard-carved “inverted chapel” becomes an autonomous space, which -like the mountain house-reversed- materializes in the genius loci of the house.

Lightweight cardboard sandwich panels were directly CNC-carved from the design files. In 2 days the cardboard space was simply pieced together by the design team.